The Washington Post and Autocracy’s Asymmetric Advantage
Liberalism is afraid to take its own side.
1. Asymmetry
Over the weekend MSNBC made a bunch of high-profile programming changes, firing Joy Reid and demoting Alex Wagner. There’s a lot of internet talk about these moves centering on racism.
That’s the wrong lens.
This isn’t a story about race. It’s not even a story about MSNBC.1
It’s about the inherent weakness of small-l liberalism and the asymmetrical advantage that illiberal, authoritarian movements possess.
Mark Lazarus is the head of SpinCo, the temporary name for a new company Comcast is spinning off with much of its cable TV assets; during this transition, SpinCo is already acting as the parent company of MSNBC. In December the Ankler reported on a concern Lazarus had about MSNBC:
Over at MSNBC, newly minted SpinCo chief Mark Lazarus has been vocal to staffers about his thoughts on the direction of the network. He has mentioned in meetings that the perception amongst Republicans that they can’t get a fair hearing on the network is something he agrees with.
Look: The fact that Lazarus is concerned about fair treatment is a good thing!
One of the hallmarks of small-l liberalism is that journalists are supposed to be concerned with both actual fairness and the perception of fairness. This internal self-regulation is one of those aspects that makes free societies work. It’s part of the honor system.
Here is the problem:
While MSNBC holds to the honor system and tries to be fair to Republicans, Fox News paid $787 million dollars so that it could knowingly lie about Democrats.
This asymmetry runs all the way through our media.
Back in October 2009 the Obama administration had a minor standoff with Fox News. Obama’s White House granted four of the broadcast networks an interview with an administration staffer, but froze out Fox. The White House comms director justified this decision by saying that Fox was “not a news organization.”
In response, the mainstream media took to the barricades to defend Fox. CNN’s Jake Tapper called Fox “one of our sister organizations.” The Washington Post worried about an “unprecedented” attack on the media. From Ruth Marcus to Brookings, the establishment defended Fox’s honor and pressured the Obama administration to reverse course.
A couple weeks ago the Trump White House banned the Associated Press from covering major events because the AP style guide still uses the term “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of America.”
Conservative media outlets have not enthusiastically leapt to the AP’s defense. Fox News and Newsmax did reportedly sign an unpublished letter disagreeing with the White House on behalf of the AP, and the editor of the Daily Wire released this tepid statement. Other right-wing media outlets seem to have stayed silent.2
Asymmetry.
Yesterday the Trump White House announced that it would no longer allow the White House Correspondents’ Association to make schedules for presidential press pools.
“The White House press team, in this administration, will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” Leavitt said at a daily briefing. She added at another point: “A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House.” . . .
“It’s beyond time that the White House press operation reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025, not 1925,” Leavitt said.
What’s going to happen next? Asymmetry.
What should happen is that the entire press corps should stop showing up to cover White House events until this policy is rescinded. Any outlet which complies with Trump and accepts pool duty should be blackballed and treated as propagandists and not journalists.
Chances of this response actually happening?
0.00%.
Here’s what will happen: Traditional media outlets will make stern statements of disappointment. They will continue to take any access they can get. They will second-guess publishing anything that might upset the White House and will justify this pullback as preventing coverage from falling to the truly illiberal propaganda outlets.
And when a propaganda outlet is tapped to be the pool, traditional media will rely on their reports. They will believe that they have no choice.
Because they think that small-l liberalism demands that they “report the news.”
2. Illiberal
All of this is already happening, today.
The New York Times released its stern statement:
The White House’s move to handpick favored reporters to observe the president — and exclude anyone whose coverage the administration may not like — is an effort to undermine the public’s access to independent, trustworthy information about the most powerful person in America.
But what is the NYT doing about this illiberal effort to undermine access to independent, trustworthy information? Nothing.
Today, on the first day of the new regime, the White House announced that it would replace the scheduled print pool reporter from a disfavored outlet, HuffPost, with a reporter from a more pliant outlet, Axios.
If Axios was interested in the liberal order, it would refuse the job. To the best of my knowledge it has not.
Also: The White House named out-and-out propaganda outlets Newsmax and the Blaze to the Wednesday press pool, were they will work alongside Bloomberg, the NYT, Reuters, AFP, NPR, and ABC.
Why are these outlets agreeing to participate in this scheme? For the same reason that mainstream media outlets defended Fox in 2009. Because liberalism’s devotion to fairness and belief in the honor system has made it incapable of taking its own side against those who would replace it with fascism.
Do you ever get the sense that if Donald Trump signed an executive order commanding the liquidation of the New York Times newsroom—I know, I know, the president can’t shut down a private company, but just bear with me—the Times would respond by:
publishing a straight-news report about it on A-1,
issuing a strongly worded denunciation on its X account, and
running an op-ed by Ross Douthat explaining that (1) eliminating the NYT had precedent dating to the pontificate of Boniface III; (2) the public’s trust in media might be improved if the NYT disappeared; because (3) Trump only made this clownish decision because of irresponsible tweets from a transgender studies professor at Oberlin.
Me too? Look, I’m being absurdist because I want to drive home the key point:
The liberal media—and here I want to keep reminding you that I mean “small-l liberal media”—doesn’t need to become the mirror image of the illiberal propaganda outlets.
But it needs to understand reality. It needs to grok that we are in the middle—maybe even past the midpoint—of an authoritarian takeover.
It needs to decide if it merely operates by the rules of liberalism, because they were the pre-existing rule set—or if it is on the side of liberalism.
Being on the side of liberalism in this moment will not be comfortable for many media organizations. It will require making hard decisions and absorbing pain.
That’s what we do here. It is—literally—how The Bulwark was born. This organization was founded by people who saw what was happening, refused to give in, and lost their jobs as a result.
We are nearly a decade into this authoritarian attempt. By now everyone who leads a media organization should know the score.
Stop acting like it’s 2012. Quit playing access games in search of scooplets. Tell the White House that you’ll fuck all the way off before you accept Newsmax as a peer.
Take your own damn side of this fight.
That’s what we’re doing at The Bulwark. Every day. Because that’s the only media model that can save this thing of ours.
Which brings us, finally, to Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.
This morning Bezos announced that he was reorienting the Post’s opinion section around “two pillars”: “personal liberties and free markets.”3
As he did this, editorial page editor David Shipley resigned. Other Post staffers are reportedly either resigning or being pushed out.
This is not about personal liberties or free markets. It’s about making the Post more amenable to the Trump administration so that Jeff Bezos’s businesses will not be punished.
And here is the final asymmetry. If the Biden administration had been willing to use the full force of the federal government to punish Jeff Bezos, then Bezos would have made the Post more friendly to Biden.
But Biden didn’t do that; because he was committed to liberal society. To personal liberties and free markets.
It is precisely the fact that Bezos understands that Trump cares nothing for “personal liberties and free markets” that leads him to disfigure the newspaper he owns.
Liberalism has no answer for oligarchs who care only about wealth, because the liberal order does not either punish or reward them without due process according to the transparent rule of law. Illiberalism, on the other hand, offers plenty of punishment and reward.
Liberal society must be willing to take its own side and elites like Bezos must be willing to accept discomfort.
If not? Well, we know where the road leads. We are already a good ways down it.
3. Pro-Life
A haunting, heartbreaking New Yorker piece about a convent of nuns in Texas trying to save the women on death row.
The Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit is a single-story red brick complex set on a hundred acres. It used to be called Mountain View, for the modest green hills on the horizon. In the fall of 2014, Ronnie Lastovica, a Catholic deacon, assisted in a Mass for the prison’s general population. Afterward, an officer told him, “There’s an offender on death row who would like to take Communion.”
The officer led Ronnie to a building that contains an area where suicidal or mentally ill inmates are kept under observation. There are also two wings housing all the condemned women of Texas.
A prisoner named Linda Carty, wearing a white tunic and baggy trousers, was brought into a bleak white common room with four round tables and chairs, all bolted to the floor. Her gray-streaked black hair was pulled back. It was like being in a black-and-white movie. She was fifty-six and had been on the row for twelve years. . . .
East of Gatesville, outside Waco, is a convent of contemplative Catholic nuns, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. Behind a privacy fence made with artificial-brick panels, a drainage ditch runs along one side of the property. It’s not some Old World monastery on a craggy mountaintop. It’s a suburban ranch house.
Deacon Ronnie knocked on the convent’s door. Visitors are infrequent. The sisters don’t teach or do missionary work; they spend their days almost entirely in silence, work, and prayer. Sister Pia Maria, who was on door duty, answered and welcomed Ronnie inside.
She guided him into a little room with a small wooden table and four uncomfortable chairs. Sitting there was the prioress, Sister Lydia Maria, a Mexican national whom Ronnie later described as a “fireball” and “quite the gal.” She wore a gray tunic, which reached to her ankles, and a white veil. . . .
Ronnie described his ministry in the six prisons in Gatesville, which held three thousand men and nine thousand women. “Then I dropped the shoe,” he recalled. He proposed that the nuns visit the women on death row.
Boatload of Caveats: I do not watch cable news. I rarely appear on cable news. I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist.
My point in all of this is simply to pull the lens all the way out and look at the conflict of liberalism vs. illiberalism from 35,000 feet.
None of this is really about MSNBC, or Joy Reid, or Alex Wagner, or Mark Lazarus, even.
Correction (February 26, 2025, 1:45 p.m.): This paragraph has been edited to mention the letter signed by Fox News and Newsmax.
At least Bezos didn’t say the Post needed more masculine energy?
Nailed the Ross Douhat bit. JVL is always insightful and engaging, and when he adds humor to the mix there's no writer I'd rather read.
We say 'a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel', but that's not really what we mean. What we mean is, a liberal is someone who will defend even their enemies.
Conservatives have not been willing to defend their enemies and have left that to liberals. When George Bush saw that he could juice his 2004 swing state numbers by passing a bunch of state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage in states that already didn't have legal gay marriage, elite conservatives went along with this even though they didn't really want to hurt the people that changing the constitutions was supposed to hurt. The Democrats and the Federal constitution still existed to defend those people; moderate Republicans could leave protecting gay people to federal judges and Democrats and reap the political benefits of anti-homosexual activism at home. What's the downside to humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.
Democrats will defend the rule of law, the rights of detainees, and the free market, allowing conservatives to demagogue on these issues for free. This reaches climaxes in 2016, where every single mainstream Republican candidate waits for someone else to denounce Donald Trump because if they don't denounce Donald Trump they can scoop up his voters once he flames out, and the 2021 impeachment, where Mitch McConnell says "The Democrats are going to take care of this son-of-a-bitch for us. If this isn't impeachable, I don't know what is."
Republicans got so used to a world where Democrats would spend their political capital to protect them that they never had to make a single sacrifice ever. And this is what hollowed out the Republican party for Trump.